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YouTube's "Remove a Song" - Wow!

Anyone who has been wasting time reading my drivel on this blog will know that I have been somewhat irritated by the lack of response from YouTube regarding spurious copyright claims on videos. I had given up for a while but felt that I simply couldn't let them get away with it!

Anyone else who has found their way here might be familiar with the copyright claims being slapped on their own videos, and how annoying that can be.
Copyright notices on videos

Copyright claims can have the following effects:
  1. You are unable to monetise your video, or have to share the monetisation with the claimant.
  2. You are forced to have adverts show on your videos when you don't want them.
  3. You may struggle to upgrade your channel to include certain features, such as live broadcasts.
  4. Your video(s) may be blocked altogether in certain regions.

To my delight and amazement I discovered that a fair bit of work has gone into solving the issue:

Notice showing that a piece of copyrighted music has been detected in a video

Two notices showing that two pieces of copyrighted music has been detected in a video

Could it be that easy?

After clicking the remove button

After clicking both remove buttons

Certainly looks like it!

YouTube have, rather quietly, introduced this "Remove a Song" tool to remove the music from your videos without affecting the rest of the audio.

So now we just hit "Save" and let the gremlins cast their magic.

Notice letting you know that it might take a while to remove the song from your video

And when the processing is finished...

Some noticed have been removed from the updated videos
Success! Well, almost. One video failed.

Notice telling you that there was an error when attempting to remove a song from a video

But let's not forget what has happened here: YouTube have managed to remove the music from the video without affecting the rest of the audio. It's very impressive and not something I would know how to do myself. My planned solution was to simply mute parts of the track, but now that isn't necessary. Yes, one failed, but the service is still in beta. Hopefully this will be one of the features that remains on YouTube. Some other features have quietly come and gone with time.

Of course if you want to do covers of songs then removing the music probably isn't an option. But that's up to you. In that case you may be able to share the advertising revenue, or simply be given permission from the copyright owner.

My videos no longer have copyright claims against them. Hurrah!

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